I'm afraid I don't have much input on your questions since I'm not there yet.

Since it appears you've had quite some success getting leads I'd like to ask you a few questions regarding your last HN post:

1) Did ariba work out for you ? If not how did you get the opportunity to bid on large company RFP's ?

2) What did you have to do to demonstrate that you were a credible supplier for these clients ? You mentioned having done work as a subcontractor. How were you able to valorize that work as representative of your own capabilities ? Were these publicly visible projects, even if your name wasn't on them ?

3) Did you have to jump through a lot of administrative hoops to be considered - ie. DUNS, business insurance requirements, etc. ?

If you're hiring employees, hopefully that means that you either have revenue or investment $. If so, I'd say yes. In my experience, most employees are excited to be using a new machine, which boosts morale.

I went with the BSD 3 Clause license for the project I am working on [1][2]. I am not a lawyer so I have no idea if this is a good license or not. I was going for one that would force people to retain the copy right notice.

Obviously you would control the developer account and name of the app. So it would take some effort and money for someone to rename and republish under a new app name.

I created a saas site (https://www.menutail.com) which does nutrition analysis and generates pdf labels for nutrition facts labels. The main demographic are small food vendors who are interested in entering bigger markets such as whole foods.

The idea came about from a pivot from a failed app (http://fs.howcookingworks.com/). In that app, users can take pictures of food, and get nutrition info back. It turns out that the need for nutrition analysis is needed much more in the enterprise space.

The validation of the idea came when pitching my local restaurants if they needed nutrition facts labels. It turns out that one restaurant did. After that, I hit the road visiting all my local farmer's markets and have been and gathered my first set of clients from those visits.

Mono is widely used in games for Linux, for what it's worth. A lot of independent games have been written in the .NET XNA framework, and Mono has a Monogame component that allows developers to port these games to Linux relatively easily.

Between the Humble Bundles including a lot of Linux ports and the Linux Steam/Steam OS launch from Valve, there's a lot of these ports coming out right now.

Probably because it isn't an official port, there is no reason to learn .NET if you don't develop exclusively for Microsoft.

If you're developing for multiple platforms chances are you already use some other toolkit with platform specific bits mixed in, mono is only useful if you are a .NET developer and then decide you want to port apps.

1) For a variety of reasons including that founders tend to have stock while employees tend to have options. Also the more practical reason that founders tend to be closer socially means that they're somewhat less likely to screw each other over.

2) Depends on your jurisdiction. If your company engages in illegal activities and you're a major shareholder/director you could be liable.

3) Share of equity, control.

4) Not really, it's just a matter of agreement.

5/6) Normally as a founder you trade-off pay for equity. If you're coming in as an employee post-fundraising there's obviously less risk involved as well.

4. It is smart to have founders have their stock vest over time, so if you get into a founder dispute, and one or two leave...it is possible for the founders that stay on to have their work continue to be recognized by continued vesting of their stock, and that departed (and thus no longer contributing via personal effort) founder/shareholders cannot be excessively benefit from the remaining founder's activity by owning shares disproportionate to their continuing activity and commitment.

More than a few startups fail, by neglecting to consider the changes that may come in founder relationships. It is important to talk about departure consequenses.

You may find it enlightening to review a few Venture Capital blogs. Here are a few.

To put this simply, you could work for equity + salary or just equity. If you are the one making things work and you believe in the vision, you should work for a fair amount of equity. Calling yourself a co-founder is just a title.

1. When I interviewed with a company in southern California, the CEO noted that there are different types of stock that get issued to the employees that are not as good. I don't know much about stocks, but it's an angle you will have to consider.

2. One thing I found is that if you're a founder, that makes you responsible for both the wins and losses for the company. So when it tanks, debt collectors will come for your stuff too. Where an employee just needs to worry about getting another job. This point alone means you'll have to carefully consider who you're getting in bed with.

3. The only reason I can find for not wanting to increase co-founders is for two purposes. One, it's another person who can flake off and start writing company checks. Two, you'll have to split profits again :)

4. I don't think so, don't quote me.

5. See 2. and 1. to weigh your options. Being a co-founder potentially has a bigger pay off but comes with responsibility.

6. See 5.

I say if you genuinely trust your future partners, to go for it. It's my understanding that if you want to be able to afford that sports car and have plenty of time off for those cool vacations; you either need to be at the top of a company or have enough money to somehow live off interest.

I was hired to build a website; I thought / was told it would serve as a "calling card" in order to attract more funding and then the situation would get re-evaluated from there. Due to my, I must admit, personal failings, I let the boundaries between client/contractor slip, and somehow I turned into employee #1 (but still a 'contractor') and the --only-- employee. I then ended up building mostly by myself a small B2B business for these assholes while they lied constantly about cash flow problems to me and the sales guys. Long story short, because I wasn't legally a founder, though in all other senses I was, when I got shoved out the airlock, there was no legal recourse I could take to get back at these people. They even tried every tactic possible to delay paying my and the other people's invoices at late as possible and as little as possible when we all quit in the space of two months.

So for question 1. It's about power. The relationship between you and "the company" is different if you are an employee versus a founder. As an employee, you aren't legally deserving of access to financial information, like cash flow. Or board meetings. At the end of the day, all that really matters is the legal paperwork and that will be different if you are a founder and not an employee (stock for employees, or options, are always mostly worthless). And as a founder, you get access to any profit, but you wouldn't as an employee. And as a founder, you would have far more of a say in how the company is run than you ever would as even employee #1

So if you are --sure-- you have a good relationship with these other people, and that they are not professional sociopaths like those I dealt with, then I'd say you could have a case to be considered as an founder. You say you are helping them with research etc - to what extent, how much, etc?

OTOH, how much responsibility do you want to have, in legal terms, and otherwise? Being a founder would require more - more complex taxes, etc, and more of a concern over how the company is run and where it is going. What do you think your role in the organization might be? I was effectively the CTO, but because I "wasn't", I didn't really have the power that comes with the title. And I was so caught up in doing the actual work, and I didn't complain enough about the overwork, that I left all these non-tangible non-technical considerations slide - and at the end of the day, if you are intimately connected to the founding of a company, these intangibles are a lot more important than anything else, including money.

To be paranoid, what if you sign on as an employee, and things go south? Can you walk away without any attachment to this company you've helped build? To what extent are you willing to play dirty hardball if the relationship goes bad? It'd be easier if you have the legal status that being a founder offers. Run all contracts past a lawyer and play "what if" scenarios to make sure you are not caught flatfooted.

I took the hard road; it was all a severe crash course in how business actually is done, versus the blather about 'company values' and 'ethics' and that nonsense. Some people are nothing but more than scoundrels and so make sure you are sure you have evaluated the character of these people thoroughly before getting into a relationship with them. I wish you luck and hope you don't go down the road I did.

Awesome idea - do you think it has any non-toy applications? Also related, do you know how far you see see the light away from if say you were in the middle of the ocean after a plane wreck (I have no idea about the physics!)

Lots of good options here but let me add one more: maybe you're completely fine and don't need to make any kind of career change.

I and many developers I know have been through a phase like you describe. This is especially true in tech, where most projects fail, and for people with wide interests like yourself. Some people would be happy writing nice code and leave it at that. But you're going to be bummed if the design is ugly, the marketing plan doesn't work, or if any of a dozen other things outside your control goes wrong. You are upset, anxious, and fearful. You attribute your feelings to objective things around you like business failures, etc. and guess that a new line of work might solve those feelings.

Let me suggest that maybe they won't. Those feelings are telling you something, but you can't trust your guesses about what will solve them, and you especially should not make large, life-changing decisions because of half-understood feelings of anxiety and depression.

Instead, try to engage with and resolve those feelings in smaller ways. Pick something small you will decide to do really well and just thoroughly engage in it. Make some new friends. Maybe go talk to a therapist or religious figure.

What I found out of this process was that I had made several career moves, some bad choices in my personal life, and a lot of stress by setting myself impossible goals and ignoring some longstanding things I disliked about myself. In the process, I learned that I wasn't really paying attention to the world around me and especially to close friends and family. After some reading, low-pressure work, and therapy, I understand my own feelings much better, and I derive much more satisfaction from my life outside work.

Of course, by no longer putting on my job the stress to define me and my value as a person, I get to approach it much more freely and joyfully. It ain't perfect, and it doesn't always work, but on a good day I can deal with setbacks and annoyances without them damaging my emotional state.

A therapist would call this cognitive therapy focused on mindfulness. Various religions would call it spiritual direction aimed at contemplation or present focus. There does appear to be actual evidence of its value, though I'm only qualified to say it works anecdotally. Good stuff.

Anyone who is interested, feel free to ask questions here or email me at username at gmail.

Sure, life is pretty grim in the sense that you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. On the other hand, your life as a coder is far, far higher quality than e.g. a construction worker's or (regrettably) a teacher's.

One thing you could do is try to grow a source of passive income. See patio11 for insights on achieving this.

Also, three failures isn't anything to worry about or lose confidence over. Just remember how many times Jobs failed. Most of the successful people on here have a similar background of failures. The path to success is usually through failure, as paradoxical as that sounds. Sometimes you'll just be unlucky multiple times in a row. That's just life. But that's also a reason to keep your spirits high, because it's far less likely you'll fail ten times in a row. So, keep trying.

> So, I'm interested to see the discussion about what those of us who are life long hackers (with a ton of varied experiences) can do besides keep writing code or moving into people management.

Considering what you said about liking prototyping, product strategy, etc. you might want to consider looking at adding some UX-ish skills to your skill set. There's a lot of overlap in goal, if not necessarily technique, and from my perspective it's even harder to find good UX folk than it is good developers at the moment.

Also - pretty much any consulting or team lead job is - at some level - people management. Don't mix up people management skills with organisational hierarchy or "being the boss" or telling people what to do.

I'd imagine that if you go chat to your uncle about his consulting work he'll tell you that large chunks of it aren't figuring out what to do - but working with people to make sure that it gets done. Management is all about helping groups of people do stuff effectively together. It's hard to think of jobs that don't involve people management of one sort or the other.

I am old enough that there was only one way to go once you hit "team leader" and wanted to earn more -> "management".

About 3 years ago I said stuff it, took a pay cut and spent a long and happy time just coding all day. It seems however that no matter which way I turn people will not let me sit in a box and type, I have to help straighten out teams, talk to humans, navigate politics.

We use coding as if it was a real job - it is no more a job than writing or literacy. A few privileged, talented people will be paid for their writing skills. the rest will use coding in the same way as literacy, as part of their job

1. You won't ever escape "people management", but that's not a bad thing. People (especially highly skilled professionals) are like autonomous self-guided missiles, you just need to know how to guide them, and let them be guided by you.

Remember - you will not be making the tough decisions - your team / people will. You just get to guide which tough decisions get looked at.

2. Having a "constant flow of new challenges" is all about building and filling a sales pipeline. This is pretty brutal work. There is nothing other than knuckling down, calling people, building audiences, sales sales sales. To me this is the biggest cost of being in business for myself - and I am a long way from having got it right.

You ask "what else besides writing code or managing people" and mention prototyping & creativity: have you considered moving into product design/UX or product management?

After working as a developer for a few years, I got a bit disillusioned with "building and fixing things all day" as you say. I now work as a User Experience architect and am still involved with building and fixing things, but in a very different way. I still write code, but mostly to prototype ideas and collaborate with developers.

A broad understanding of various technologies and lack of specialisation/investment in particular frameworks is a plus, as you can understand what's required, without getting bogged down in details. You can take a leading role, without having to be anyone's boss.

Write. I don't mean the standard documentation kind of stuff, but "XYZ For Hackers" articles and books. There's a serious lack of people doing that, because it requires both technical chops to understand the material plus a large time and skill-development commitment to do the actual writing. In an ideal world, you'd have the opportunity to do some serious tinkering with a couple of brand-new technologies a year, then be the first to write for a very hungry audience, then you'd move on. Combine that with some speaking and more speculative commentary, and it could even get pretty lucrative.

It sounds like you like process and management, but doesn't have that authoritative leader streak. It sounds like you are technically capable, but you feel that you've missed the boat to be a top coder or engineer. It still sounds like you can be very useful, especially with your experience. Perhaps look at the new developments in the project or process management space and ride with it, or keep prototyping to try new business ideas on the side.

> Management-wise I struggle with giving critical feedback to people as their "boss".

Don't be a boss. Ask for "Lead [...]" in your job title, and get your colleagues to do what you tell them because of technical seniority, not hierarchical seniority.

As for your path: convince your company to let you develop a product with an Open Source license. Tell them it will provide them with free advertising, increase their notoriety in the industry, and mean they'll get other companies to work on their project for free.

Contact other companies and promote your project, this is simply a trojan horse for building a great contact list. This then leaves you free to move on to freelance down the road by charging for features, but fixes and support. It also allows you to find work really easily.

If you tried 3 self-funded ventures you should know there's tons to do outside of coding. Maybe not when there's zero traction and just one person on the team, but as soon as there's more than that, there's plenty to do that's not coding. Managing systems, managing customers, managing finances, marketing, general office 'stuff'. And hell, no coder spends all their time actually coding.

One of my friends is just re-learning coding after being in startups for seven years simply because he was so busy doing all that other stuff for the startups he worked for.

Arguably, managing/dealing with people - not necessarily as their boss - is always going to be part of life, not to mention any business venture, so I'd say there's no getting away from that.

Sales might not be so bad for the right product---especially when you consider the "superpowers" you have relative to the average salesman. Who writes their own crawler to find potential clients? You can.

I've been in the same situation - now you are not in your best mental shape, so help can be obtained from a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist.

After 6 months on antidepressants I was again in top-notch condition and the effect continued after I stopped the medication.

To fight the boredom and anxiety you can use some medicine, widely used in the college, but I don't remember its name. A colleague of mine was using it responsibly and he was extremely productive and was more calm when communicating with our manager.

You could argue that the mapping of manufacturing and processes into the technology world is ERP systems. If you find that kind of world interesting and also like software then you could do worse to look into that area - certainly there is no lack of work in that area and there a lot of technical issues around integration and a lot of opportunities for 3rd party products.

I was at a struggling startup and was going through some of the same issues. I decided to take a one year contract as a dev on a low stress project to give myself time to figure out what I wanted to do next without having to burn through savings. With a 9-5 schedule I'm doing some more traveling, relaxing, going to meetups, and doing some consulting projects. I also learned that I don't like working at a huge institution where no one is invested in the project. It helped me reinforce my passion for startups. You seem like you have some hard skills. You just seem depressed that you didn't succeed in the last few ventures. You've got to do it for the love of the game, not for the love or money/power/fame/whatever.

1 possible route is to gather domain knowledge and move into the core business.

A common career path in finance for instance is start out as a developer, pick up the business side and later move to a function closer to the market (risk analyst, quant, structuring etc). Must be similar avenues for other domains. You need to be on top of the domain subject@hand anyway to be a good dev in my opinion...

Become an expert in efficiency. Company processes are what separate great companies from good ones. The ability of having processes down, and duplicating those for scalability without foregoing quality. If you make yourself an expert on being able to see holes in efficiencies, then you create a lot of value for yourself.

This is just what I found when working, it would be the first thing people notice and reward, in companies.

It sounds like you need to look at your situation with a detached perspective - when you are in the middle of something it is hard to know what to do.

My thought is you need to do something totally different for 6 to 12 months. It really does not matter what you do, but jobs that involves hard physical labor help separate what is important from what is not.

Are you able to focus on only one thing and for more than 5 years? Almost nothing extraordinary can happen before 5 years. Even if you sell before.

Example: I am 99% sure I can make millions of dollars if I go on my yard and start making a hole in the floor. Although, here are the constraints:- working 18 hours a day.- every day and 7 days a week. No vacation.

Is your requirements list compatible with classical "systems analyst" role, or if not, the details why would probably help narrow the field. Ditto "product manager" role.

Also you need to evaluate yourself by your own metrics. In the grand scheme of things over human history having a "career" and "advancement" is unusual, apparently temporary, and is going away, back to the way it was. Being born into a declining economic era is not a personal failure worth feeling stressfully responsible about. Work to live vs live to work and all that.

Ask yourself a question: Would it make a difference if Photoswarm was making 2-5x the money it's making now/if it had 2-5x the users?

If the answer is, "No, our new B2B project is too big/too profitable/too exciting for us to devote time to Photoswarm," then maybe the answer is to just let it sit on the sidelines, or to sell it if you can find someone who will take care of your baby.

If the answer is, "Yes, that would be awesome, we'd love to go fulltime on it!" then the answer might be to see if you can 2-5x your revenue. In that case, here are a few things to try:

- Charge more. Double or triple all your prices (for new customers) and add a "Call us" enterprise plan for a few weeks. See if it impacts signups at all.

- Expand your reach. Make some cool photography resources or infographics or do a case study with a successful customer, and post it online. Make it sharable. Offer details/more cool stuff in exchange for an email address. Then refer to the last bullet.

- Do targeted sales. Use Facebook ads/adwords to advertise to photographers. Use LinkedIn mail to reach out to photographers that might use your service. Ask them about their business, ask them for advice for your offering, offer them free months of service as thanks, etc.

I'm all for responsible disclosure, and going public in case a vendor ignores the issue. But publishing the private data of innocent people on bittorrent? And they have the audacity to write it in the tone of a honest security researcher? I call them irresponsible pricks.

Really, I'd have more sympathy with them if they would have used the security hole for criminal purposes, for their own monetary gain. Not nice, but I would have gotten that. But just dumping private data on the net, and believing people should even be thankful for it... that is insane.

Thankfully its probably just a list of filenames, but even that can do enough damage, and they have no right to do so.

Well, I was considering getting an ASUS to replace my current Netgear R6200 (the built-in DNS relay stops working after a few days of operation and can't be disabled). Now it's looking like I'd be better served building a little ITX box and doing it myself.

Congrats on finding gold :) I don't want to sound like a sales man for Market Samurai, but I recently went through their training videos (www.noblesamurai.com/dojo/marketsamurai/) and have been using the app itself to get better visibility into what people are searching for and how to rank better. A few quick thoughts:

* look for long tail search terms (still related to your content) with high SEO value; that is, search queries that have high volume and low competition

* for your broader keywords (let's say "nfl draft research"), you can find out which other sites are also specifically targeting that phrase. Once you know your competitors (esp the ones who outrank you), you can find backlinks that are boosting the competitors search rankings. Some sites are pretty entrenched and have thousands/millions of high authority backlinks, but many niche sites can easily catch up to the top 5 ranked search results

I've seen basic SEO research and work (putting keywords into your title, h1, and URLs, consistency, etc) work miracles in terms of free traffic, especially for longer tail keywords.

Some recommend using the Google keyword planner tool to ascertain if very many people seem to be searching for whatever it is that you have in mind.

Obviously this works better for some categories of ideas than others; if your idea is innovative and unique, the fact that nobody is searching for it doesn't necessarily mean anything. On the other hand, few people searching for "royalty-free polka music" is probably a good indicator of a not-very-valuable idea...

Consultancy specialized on the edX project, and hiring to handle increasing demand. edX is a free software project, used by various universities and companies to run online courses. See edx.org, class.stanford.edu, france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr or codecoalition.com for examples of edX instances.

It's a large Python/Django codebase, with good code standards and architecture (a lot of the edX engineers come from MIT). You would work on different clients contracts using the platform. The clients list/references include Harvard, edX themselves, the French government, and various startups & universities currently running their own instances, or looking to create one. Tasks are varied, from developing custom features for specific courses (XBlocks), customizing instances, developing generic platform features, deploying instances, working on both client/server sides, etc.

Most of your work would be published as free software (edX is released under the AGPL license, which requires clients to release modifications under the same license), and you would also contribute to the free software project, pushing some of your developments upstream through pull requests, contributing features, documentation or help on mailing-lists.

You would be able to work remotely from where you want, as long as you have a good internet connexion. : )

Located in the downtown Toronto campus of Rogers Communications, Rogers Media is actively seeking a freelance web developer with strong PHP / WordPress knowledge and exceptional front-end (JavaScript / jQuery / CSS3) skills for an initial three-month contract, with the opportunity to turn that into much more.

Our technology stack is split between WordPress (PHP/MySQL, hosted within the company) and Ruby On Rails. Our mission is to architect, create and assist the growth of brands of the likes of Sportsnet, Maclean's, Citytv, 680 News and Chatelaine, plus literally nearly a hundred others.

Despite a couple of tough years for the media industry, Rogers Media remains committed to making a name for itself for having the best digital division in the Canadian media landscape. We're steadily growing our web and mobile development teams, and like in any time of uncertainty and change, there's enormous opportunity to do amazing new things. I think 2014 is going to be a great year for us.

I started off in web development, doing mid-large size lead generation web sites. As a big part of dealing with lead generation, I became proficient in RESTful API integration and development, along with complex javascript web applications used for analytics. I then began working on iPhone and iPad applications over the years, working on apps for Cie Studios, BuySellAds, and their respective clients. My ability to understand complex api's, also helped me build connection management and caching systems for iOS apps that assured the user that their information would always be posted to the server, regardless of their data connection.

SEEKING WORK -- Remote or local. I'm based out of nowhere in particular, and like to travel to interesting places.

Full stack software engineer with 5+ years experience and a math background. Mostly I do heavy lifting in Java and Clojure. I've worked on complicated cloud pipelines, full-stack web apps, and in a past life, high volume, near real-time distributed trade processing applications for a Big Finance Company. I've also done work with parsing, domain specific languages, full-stack web development, custom high-speed message queues, and security and encryption. I like to solve hard problems.

We are an organization devoted to building web tools for progressive activists and nonprofits worldwide. Right now we have two main products that we've been working on -- an online petitioning and campaigning tool, and a donations platform is in the works. Our clients include 350.org, Greenpeace India, and 38 Degrees. To get a sense for what we do, you can view the petitions platform in action here: http://campaigns.350.org/

We're looking for part-time and possibly full-time web developers. We're located in both NYC and Buenos Aires -- a small and remote Rails company. We generally prefer those who work in the same time zone, but we still would like to talk to those who might live in different time zones.

Experience with Rails is preferred, but not necessary. Drop us a line at talk - at - controlshiftlabs.com

I am a fullstack web developer who typically writes Ruby and Javascript/Coffeescript. I have been working with Rails for the last three years and working on the front end (markup and styling) since I was in high school (ten years ago). My recent projects include an XBRL parser to extract balance sheets, work on a Rails app for Bookandtable.com (checkout their staging url at http://staging.bookandtable.com, they're about to launch), and a JS/frontend heavy web app to endorse candidates in the NYC mayoral primary.

I am looking for part time/half time work as I have one other client at the moment. I am teaching him the Rails framework as we work together re-writing his production Drupal app in Rails.

I am a human/machine interface designer && developer. My work consists of "from scratch" UX and interface design, from the napkin to nginx.I have considerable experience with Ruby and Javascript, years of experience with Rails, and extensive knowledge of client-side MVC.

I've made contributions to Ember.js, and have written multiple 10k+ LOC apps - starting with 0.9 up to the latest 1.0 (one was recently featured on Venture Beat: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/22/uniiverse-releases-direct-...). I am acutely aware of the challenges/strategies associated with migrating server side architecture into the browser, leaning down views, and fattening up controllers.

NYC based consultant. Full stack developer (Rails since 2005). Coffee Script/Javascript. ReactJS. Backbone. More languages than you can throw a stick at. Etc. . . .

Available in April

Either for remote or on-site consulting, particularly around getting teams set up with good development workflows. I'm great to have for a project kickoff. Lots of startup and small biz experience (ex CTO, VP Engineering, etc. . .).

I'm picky. Very happy with the company that I'm consulting with now, but will be doing some heavy traveling this summer (based in Berlin for June and July). Looking for short gigs.

Full stack web engineer specializing in Python. Heavy Google App Engine experience. Also versed in Django, Bottle. Heavy html5/css/js experience building responsive web sites, including with frameworks e.g. bootstrap, jQuery. More of an implementer than a designer.

Past projects include the God of War website (godofwar.com), various web crawlers and data importers for various clients, and a social voting app for Google and Sunlight Foundation. I have I also have previous startup experience at Getaround, a bay area p2p car sharing marketplace.

I love hacking together MVPs, building out features, building web crawlers and data importers, static analysis. Would love to hear from you and learn about your project!

SEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area - Remote or Local - Long or Short Term Projects

I'm an expert at creating APIs and building client applications (browser-based and mobile apps) powered by APIs.

API Development - I've designed, built, and scaled APIs for many different application profiles, from large complex data models, event subscription architecture, high transaction volume (25K requests/second), to simple REST APIs. I have a lot of experience analyzing data models and use cases to determine API structure, architecture, and recommended implementation. I know the ins and outs of REST vs RPC, JSON vs XML, and hypermedia vs traditional. I've implemented APIs using Rails, Node.js, and Java platforms. Bottom line - if you need an API developed, I can take you through the process from start to finish.

Single-Page JS App Development - I've led development on multiple single-page JavaScript apps in both desktop and mobile environments. I have significant JavaScript experience and have built full applications from scratch using Backbone.js, Ember.js, and AngularJS. Recently I worked with Balanced Payments to build a web interface for their payments platform using Ember.js. The whole project is open source - check it out! https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard

Traditional Web Development - While I've spent most of my time lately working on APIs and API-driven apps, I also have ten years of experience doing traditional server-side web development. If you need a Rails or Java generalist to build a product, augment your team or maintain existing code, get in touch!

I have just completed my ongoing projects and I am back here for more. I have been doing freelance work from reddit and HN successfully for the past year or so.

I am a software engineer working in one of the country's largest e-commerce websites.

I love learning and working on new technologies and platforms, but currently, my main experience is in Node.js and PHP. I also have some experience in working with Ruby and Sinatra. I work on linux, and I have deployed and managed web, database and application servers on CentOS and Ubuntu. I am familiar with bash scripting. I am also familiar with some basic Python and Go, but I have never really got a chance to work on it.

One of my previous jobs involved working with a large WordPress application, so I am quite adept with WordPress too. Most of my freelance work from reddit has been on the wordpress front: Customizing and working on various plugins. I have worked with various data stores too: Mysql, mongodb, redis are the primary ones.

On the front end side, I have worked on big JavaScript projects working with various html5 APIs. I dig semantic clean HTML markup and know my way around CSS.

I have worked on AWS on an earlier job, though my current organization has its own servers in a data center. I like working on big problems, "architecting" solutions which scale out and working on them, and tackling and troubleshooting live issues. I usually try to work on git whenever possible.

I am looking for medium to long term projects, and I love working remotely. Let me know if you have anything interesting and we can chat. Email me at mail@munimkazia.com.

Ive done apps for web, desktop, and mobile, but my heart is in desktop apps.

My workflow is doing short (1-week) iterations that add business value, where the product is fully usable at the end of each iteration.

Im looking for part-time work (10-hours per week).

----

Proficient with:

* Clojure, Ring, Compojure, Hiccup, GardenCSS

* ClojureScript

* Datomic

* iOS, AppKit

* Cocoa, Objective-C

* Rails, Sinatra

* Web (full-stack)

* User Experience (UX) Design

* Ruby, Go, C

* SQL (using a native ORM)

* User Interface (UI) Design for Desktop

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Some experience with:

* Java, Swing

* Windows: WinForms, WPF, XAML

* Windows 8 apps

* Python, Django

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My weaknesses:

* Responsive Design

* The JavaScript language (I usually use ClojureScript instead)

* User Interface (UI) Design for Web

* Java, Android

* Chef, designing infrastructures from scratch

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Portfolio:

* cleancoders.com: a web app written in Clojure, ClojureScript, Datomic, Ring, Compojure, and Hiccup. I wrote both the front-end and back-end, designed the architecture, and have been the sole developer.

We've helped entrepreneurs develop their MVP, as well as large companies develop core features. We provide services such as feature development, product management, and software auditing.Previous engagements include Getaround, Codecademy, Factset, Wakemate, drip.fm, and Swiftstack, among others.

I'm a web dev / design consultant with an increasingly demanding workload and I'm looking to bring in some help. I'm based out of NYC / LA (yes both, kinda). I need folks in 2 areas -

1) Frontend / full stack web dev (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP). I need someone with very solid frontend web dev skills... and are comfortable and happy working with Wordpress. Some of my client projects are big demanding challenges, some of them are just CMS sites. You should be cool with either.

Also - I've posted in this thread on HN before for a client and we got a lot of responses last time. Please please please include skills, links to your work, profiles on Github or Linkedin or a resume and some background info about you. Thanks!

Are you looking to take an existing application to the next level or build one from scratch? Thinking about rolling out an API? Maybe you're concerned about application security...

We should talk, I'm a full stack engineer with 8+ years experience building secure, distributed applications using Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, JS/Backbone/Meteor, HTML/CSS, MySQL, ... and I'd love to hear from you. It has been my experience that these opportunities tend to be mutually beneficial!

Of late, I've been doing a fair bit of sysadmin work so we could also talk about that if it is of interest.

I'm a writer. I'm a pretty good one, too. (Feel free to look at my HN history and vehemently disagree, however.) I've been published in Slate, Priceonomics, Harvard Business Review, and other blogs and mags. I've been on NPR a few times, which was pretty darned fun.

By day I'm a marketer and growth optimizer. But recently I've signed a book deal, and I would love to take more time to focus on it. So I'm looking for remote and freelance opportunities. The sort of work that's interesting and pays the bills, or if you're feeling unusually generous, the sort that keeps me in Teslas and Tom Ford.

About:I am an adaptive problem solver. I learn new technologies and techniques quickly. I am a full stack developer and administrator. Security is not an afterthought. I believe in make it work, make it right, make it fast.

I'm a front-leaning, full-stack developer that is splitting time between Brooklyn and Berlin, and I am currently in Berlin. I am American, and know just a little bit of German (but am learning).

I have experience with every aspect of creating an application, from mockups and UX design, to graphic design, to the full-stack implementation, to deployment.I've successfully built and sold a past start-up of mine, and have a great deal of insight with product development. Because of this, I'm probably of most value the earlier a project is in its life cycle.

Backend stack: Ruby on Rails, with DBs/data stores such as MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, and Redis. I've also worked a bunch with Elastic Search. I can also use Node.js or PHP for the right project, but lately I've been doubling down on being a backend mono-glot.

Frontend stack: my preference is Angular.js, and I've also worked Backbone and Meteor. I am very well-versed in current best practices, can build responsive mobile-friendly websites, and code pixel perfect CSS and HTML5. I have a great deal of graphic design experience and can help there as well.

We're working on an exciting project with tremendous potential in an unsexy, but niche space. We have paying customers in the pipeline, and now we need to deliver.

We need a designer to help with the overall look and feel of a web-based dashboard. The goal is to take lots of technical data, information, analytics, and controls and whittle them down into a well-presented dashboard.

There is potential for continuing work on this project, and others, branching into mobile app development as well.

I'm being intentionally vague, as I don't want to give out too many details publicly. Suffice it to say, it's exciting enough that I left a very well-known startup in the Bay Area to move to Toronto for this.

I'm looking for an A-level designer here that we could work with for the foreseeable future, so my standards are pretty high. Send me links to your past projects, portfolio, and Dribbble to xpatel [at] pulsecode [dot] ca.

P.S. Our current website is a poor signal for the kind of quality we're looking for, so don't hold that against us. It also will not help you figure out what the project is.

I'm an experienced software developer with a strong full-stack web background. I don't just build your app/site, I'll also help you put the concept together if need be, and I'm good at filling the blanks with underspecified projects.

SEEKING WORK - Remote/Freelance Python/Django/jQuery, with extensive experience building e-commerce marketplaces. I have a research background, data analysis, playing around with NLP right now. I run a django dev shop, currently taking gigs for it. Here's my portfolio:

I do full stack web dev, with either Clojure or Ruby/Rails. I did Rails work full time for about the last year, and have been working in Clojure for my side projects for the last few years. I like writing clean, testable, composable, pure functions where possible in whatever language I happen to be working in. I can build a basic responsive UI with bootstrap, but I'm not much of a designer, and I'm decent at Javascript (and Clojurescript), but prefer backend work.

Currently lead DevOps at my full time employment (Inflection). My experience is in helping to find bottlenecks from development to deployment and to create a more efficient workflow. I work daily to manage a multitude of servers, all Puppet modules, packaging and deployment. I am the go-to guy when something breaks and no one else has a clue where to start looking.

I was iOS team lead for one of the major navigation apps in Taiwan, and have since created medium sized apps (over two dozen viewcontrollers) for multiple clients. I also have experience with Python, HTML/CSS, javascript, git/svn. I love working with people who are dedicated to designing the best user experience possible.

You can find me at ray.tsaihong at gmail if interested in discussing work opportunities. Thanks!

Developer and designer (4+ years), work out of my own shop, Heta (http://heta.co). Primarily develop, design, and customize WordPress themes, or convert PSD designs or HTML/CSS/jQuery to WordPress. I'm also building an app and run my own server as a hobby.

I've worked on complex sites for digital agnecies (30+ templates, 25+ plugins), as well as on smaller sites for small businesses/individuals (10 templates, 10 plugins).

I usually do Python, Django, mobile backends, PostgreSQL/*DB, JS, Angular, Scala, Go, system architecture, database design, automation, devops (Ansible, Salt) and whatever it takes to get the job done.

I'm capable of executing all stages of projects, starting from a customer idea and ending with a ready, deployed product.I have a broad technical and domain-specific knowledge (medical, financial, automotive, location-based services, machine-learning, analytics, wavelets) and several years of experience working for startups, business customers and open-source.

I am an iOS software engineer with experience shipping apps (8 personal, and a bunch more for various enterprise clients the past couple years) and writing scalable, maintainable code. I'm atypical in the sense that I also have an art degree and can design the UI/UX of an app and then go ahead and program it too. I like working fast and want to take on short to medium-term projects that won't have varying levels of bureaucracy and maddening back-and-forth. If this sounds like the kind of project you need accomplished for iPhone or iPad, read further.

Backend software engineer, specializing in Python/Django development. If you have the design, I can turn it into a working website. Looking for part-time gigs (10 hours/week, I currently hold a full-time job). Willing to offer discount to build my portfolio.

Contact details in my profile.

---------------------------------------------

Server-side: Python - Django.

Database: Postgresql

OS: Ubuntu, OSX

Infrastructure: AWS, Linode, Vagrant, Git.

Devops: Ansible

Others: I have experience building reporting systems, web crawlers and APIs.

Front-end: Basic HTML/CSS/Javascript/jQuery - I don't do much design work.

I love Django/Python development, although I also have experience with PHP, Perl, and a variety of other languages. I can write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by hand, configure and secure your Linux server, and optimize Apache or nginx to help your website scale. I write technical specifications, use comments in my code, and am adept at Git.

Members of this community have been some of my favorite clients. I have created MVPs, debugged troubling technical issues, and provided advice. I love hearing about other people's projects and helping to make the Internet better.

I specialize in building high quality MVPs for startups. One recent client was accepted to Y Combinator and another client was accepted to the "Plug and Play" accelerator after I built their apps.

In addition to full-stack development with Ruby on Rails and Ember.js, I will help you with product direction and feature development. I challenge clients to eliminate unnecessary features which results in cost savings and focused MVPs.

I'm a strong believer in automated testing which translates into a high quality product with little to no user facing bugs. This gives my clients an extremely high level of confidence when adding new features and deploying.

If you're looking for someone to make your vision come to life, give me a call.

Experienced mobile developer. I can work on projects of all sizes, build APIs, help develop architecture and conceptualize ideas. I've been involved from beginning (requirements, analyst) to end (deployment). I love problem solving and building elegant, clean and modern solutions.

Best suited helping startups get a nice marketing site/materials together for their product (website, blog, email templates). I've worked with companies big and small designing, developing, and deploying WordPress sites that focus on promoting products or services.

I offer a total package for WordPress starting at $7k: landing page, two custom page templates, blog, UI kit, assets/backups to Amazon S3, and deployment workflow (this is huge for startups).

I'm an experienced Android developer with several published apps, both for myself and for clients. I'm looking to take on 1, maybe 2 mid-sized projects within the next month. I have an Android designer who can work with me. All my apps follow Google's design guidelines and can be tablet-optimized as well.

Please reach out at tony.chuinard@gmail.com if you'd like to chat more.

Just want a banana, and end up getting the gorilla and jungle too? My experience will help you define your business needs, and come up with the right solution to fit your requirements.

Full-Stack Developer. Front end development in Responsive HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript (jQuery, jQuery mobile, JSON), and RESTful APIs built with PHP or Node.js on the server. Emphasis on a strong design to build projects that are simple and attractive.

Specializing in iOS and Android apps built with Cordova/PhoneGap that work beautifully on different screen sizes and devices.

I'm a Ruby developer based in London, looking for contract work to go alongside my part-time work at a successful YC startup and my undergraduate studies.

I love working in Rails, and have particularly outstanding experience building Twilio applications, from whole-company phone systems to small SMS services. I spoke about a cloud-based phone system I built at Twilio's European conference in 2013.

Apart from that, I have plenty of general Ruby experience, working with clients from charities to web hosting companies. I'm not afraid to work in Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3, and am happy to negotiate on price to find an arrangement that works for you.

My name is Ram Rachum, and Im a freelance software developer. I help businesses solve their problems using software, mostly by developing web-based applications. I work mainly in Python and Django.

On the technical level, its my responsibility to have high problem-solving skills; to design a good architecture for each project I work on; to implement that architecture quickly and effectively; and to be experienced with the languages and frameworks that Im using, so when a problem comes up, I dont have to spend 2 hours to research and solve it but rather just 5 minutes, because Ive seen that problem dozen of times before.

On the project-management level, its my responsibility to communicate clearly and honestly with the client and my collaborators on the project; to understand exactly what the client wants to build as we plan together how to build it; to always keep the client updated about progress; to have an owner mentality and make decisions with the best interest of the client in mind; to own up to mistakes when they happen; and to always get feedback as early as possible from the client and from the users, so we know were not wasting time going into blind alleys, and were spending time only on features that the users are happy with. My email is ram@rachum.com . Send me an email and say hello.

About: I've been developing iOS apps professionally for 5 years. Worked on a large variety of projects and enjoy taking on new challenges and working with the latest technologies. I've had my own and clients apps reach top positions on the App Store. I'm currently seeking new clients for remote work.

SEEKING FREELANCERS : Pathable (http://pathable.com) - Seattle or REMOTE Pathable is hiring expert javascript engineers and UI designers. We're innovating how single-page applications are built and we need your help. Our industry leading social networking application is focused on conferences and events. It's 75% JavaScript and 25% Ruby. We support several open source projects including Backbone and QuiltJS. We've embraced remote working to a degree you won't find anywhere else. Learn more: http://www.pathable.com/

I'm a motivated student with a passion for front-end Android development and full stack web development. I've worked on Android applications and devices used by millions of people around the world, I've built websites for small businesses in South Jersey, and I've hacked together projects to test run new technologies.

Past things I done: Ecommerce, API's, apps for iOS and Android, intranets, medical compliance systems, CMS, CRM, surveying, events/ticketing, blah de blah. I can build your MVP or help further along the path!

Recently helped a couple of clients with next version of their web projects - implemented search using haystack for organicinputs.ca, integration with payment gateways like PaypalExpress, PX Fusion for next version of http://architecturemedia.com/

https://www.book-pay.com went live in June 2013 - developed from scratch in Django and Postgres,a site for booking seat for cycling tours offered by www.londonbicycle.com - so far 530+ users with 400+ seats booked

Experienced (13 years) Front end developer available for short and long term remote contracts. I enjoy building amazing websites and user interfaces, with an emphasis on usability and experience. I have experience working with remote teams, managing outsourced contractors, startups (I am the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup).

Software Developer specializing in Web and Data Engineering, freelancing while I build my startup. I spent three years as a Data Analyst, then quit and taught myself to code. I've only been freelancing for six months, so I'm willing to work at a discount while I build up my portfolio. I'm also open to bartering.

I'm a Rails developer with several years of experience and a CS degree. My area of expertise is building APIs and integrating with external services. I will build out your MVP quickly or help engineer an existing product. Lets talk in person, hangout, or skype.

Here's what I do best:- Planning: wireframes, on paper or in Balsamiq- Concepts: Photoshop mock-ups of pages and flows- Build: HTML, CSS and JS. I prefer HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript- Integration: I can integrate into any app or framework.

I've been a designer/developer since 2002. For the last 3 years, I've been focused on helping start-ups design and build their products.

Over 9 years of experience in Java. I specialize in the following stack: Wicket, Spring Core, JPA/Hibernate with MySQL, and Jetty; but I'm happy to work with anything else. I think I can help you the best if what you need is an internal or client-facing web app with a fairly complex UI, but this is by no means a requirement. I can also help fixing a previous project for you.

Android developer as well for around 3 years.

I don't do design or front-end myself. I'm happy to work with other developers of your choice, or I can recommend you the ones I've been working closely with over the past few years.

I am a full stack web developer located in Warsaw, Poland. I am especially well versed in the following technologies:

Python

* Django

* Flask

Web Frontend

* AngularJS

* HTML5

* CSS3

* JavaScript

* Bootstrap, Foundation, SASS, Compass

* chances are I have at least a passing familiarity with any web related technology that the industry is currently buzzing about

Also

* PHP, PostreSQL, Photoshop

In the past I have worked for corporate clients, small businesses, start-ups and individuals. I feel right at home in any kind of project, be it just an idea that needs to take form or a legacy application with tons of dependencies and scarce documentation.

Contact me at igor.kalat * gmail.com or using following phone number: +48 501-414-062

Every website and marketing push involves content. But is your content effectively supporting your business goals? Is it performing as well as you want it to?

Chances are, if you hired a writer, or if you did it yourself, your content could do more to achieve your business goals. The missing ingredient is usually a careful combination of information/UX design, content, and ongoing testing.

I CAN HELP

If your content is not performing as well as you'd like, or you need new content for your marketing efforts, let me know and I'll gladly take some time to chat with you about potential solutions. If I'm the right fit for your needs, I'll share work samples and work up a proposal.

Sysadmin with deep understanding and knowledge of best practices regarding:

Privacy / Anonymization technologies and practices

Server Co-location / Web-hosting

Operational Security

Open Source Crypto tools

I can provide hosting reccomendations here in Iceland as well as Remote Hands work. Also deeply interested in knowledge about Icelandic law regarding technologies like Tor, Bitcoin and Internet Infrastructure.

I'm a designer and developer who can swiss army knife a lot of different tasks. I do front-end/back-end (wordpress/drupal/node.js), graphic design, interface design, branding, UI/UX etc. I'm more of a front-end guy/designer than an engineer but I believe I'm pretty good at ramping up on most things.

Hello Show is modernizing a key workflow for real estate agents. The current market for real estate technology is vastly underserved and Hello Show is building the tools agents need and deserve. With our product in development, we already have beta customers who have fallen in love and are anxious to sign up now! We are a results and data driven team, and use Agile/SCRUM processes to build.

Skills & Requirements:

- Javascript expert

- Expert with Angular.js and Node.js

- Expert interfacing with APIs

- Expert HTML 5 and CSS skills

- Focus on test driven development

- Appreciation for Web Accessibility and how that should translate to code.

- Insane attention to detail

- Desire and ability to continuously learn and implement new technologies

- Effective communication with team members, focusing on project requirements, capabilities, and schedule

- Love of building products that people love

You are welcome to work remotely.

Application Instructions:

To apply, send an email to join@helloshow.com. Be sure to reference the job posting and where you came across it. Please provide any information that will help us in our decision process (resume, portfolio, github, etc). If you seem like a good fit, we will want you to come by for a face-to-face interview or chat on Skype. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Federis GroupWe're a small software consultancy looking for front end and full stack engineers. Rails and/or mobile experience a plus, but not strictly required. Our team is based in Chicago, but we're open to remote as well.

Lambda is a talent agency for freelance developers and designers. We help you find clients, negotiate for higher rates, and take care of the business side of freelancing.

- Exceptional talent only: $100/hr minimum rate. - No recruiters or spam. We're developers too and we only match consultants with projects that fit their expertise and interest. - Serious clients only: Wanna hear about a disruptive social network for cats that "just needs a coder"? Neither do we. - Freelancers with side projects or startups are especially welcome!

We've posted about this on HN a few times and have been amazed by the response. I apologize in advance if it takes a while for us to get back to you -- we interview everyone personally and are still ramping up the process.

Android developer is needed to create a small native app from scratch (Targeting Android 4.0+). Work to ideally commence on Monday February 10. On site developer is preferred but I will consider remote -- we're based 5 minutes from Oxford Circus tube station.

I have over 6 years of experience designing logos and building websites for a wide range of clients from across the globe. Thanks to this, I have built up a solid foundation in branding fundamentals and front-end development which I'll be putting to good use when working with you on your projects.

I'm also excited about web apps and the backend which has led me to become quite familiar with the workings of Nginx, Node.js and MongoDB. I'm keenly interested in gaining more experience in this area so please get in touch if you're building on this stack.

My design portfolio is up at dffrnt.com and you can reach me on my email, vijay at dffrnt.com

We are a small group of developers specializing in relational database-driven applications. We have a lot of experience with digging into other people's old, broken code and fixing it, quickly. Cleaning up and consolidating legacy databases is our bread and butter. No hairy ball of spaghetti code is too big for us. We do the work your own developers are too afraid to tackle.

You have the will and the ability to learn on your own. That's one necessity out of the way. You will confront things you don't know about every day. There is no reason to load up on them before you actually need them. Once you have the foundation taken care of (Python) then you can learn the rest on the job.

From here, it's basically all marketing. You need to learn how to sell yourself. First stop, start collecting feedback as soon as possible. If you are looking for a job, then start applying right now. You will start to learn a lot from the responses you get back. If you are looking for freelance work, then start hustling up some clients.

While you are looking, start doing whatever you can through social channels. Get on Github and find some interesting projects that you can contribute to. A perfect fit would be to find a company you would like to work for which happens to have an open source project on Github that you can contribute to. Locate the Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and other accounts of other Python developers. Use that to find out other places these guys hang out. Look for IRC hangouts as well as forums and other communities where you can get in touch with people. Build your weakly linked networks. Get known. Make a bit of noise. As people get to know you then they will think about you when they are looking to hire someone.

Other things you can jump into? Javascript, CSS, HTML. Check out things like Parse, Firebase and similar and build applications which don't even require back-end code (or very minimal.)

That's great that you have released apps that other people use. That's a lot more than a lot of other developers ever do. You are better than you think you are. Now is the time.

- Do some napkin statistics gathering on who's looking for what, and how many outfits are looking for what (eg. what are people looking for in your area? Django? Flask? Google App Engine? Learn the top of the list.

Good luck and keep us updated. I am contemplating a similarly-risky move and I have nothing but respect for you and confidence that you'll succeed. You certainly sound like you have your stuff in order.

1 I wouldn't hire you as a consultant because you have no industry experience. Mom and pop shops might, though, but I suspect you wouldn't be able to live off of it full-time.

Don't look at it this way. You can never be <xyz> by <date>. You just get started. The question to ask will be "Will someone hire me to do web dev work if I can present abc skills and blah experience/portfolio ?". Something like that. Don't wory about June/July whatever.

- What python specific technologies have you learned ? You say webapp2+Jinja2 whch is a great start. Take a look at other popular frameworks (Django,Flask etc). I personally recommend Flask. It is a good balance in my opinion between too much abstraction (Django) vs nothing (barebone WSGI) to pick up python web development.

- Do you/Are you building a portfolio to show your work ? Github etc ? The best thing to do is to build sample apps and show people.

If you are looking for a suggestion on what to learn next, it will be test-driven development. If you get this right (and because you've built 20+ apps, it won't even take a month), you should be employable by April.

The biggest misconception people without developer jobs have is that the non-dev-job guys assume that the dev guys have every skill memorized and mastered to the tee.

Truth is that most of them are learning as they go like you are. New technologies come out too fast for anyone to truly master anything these days (eg. AngularJS frontend Ninja with 5+ years exp == that company is balls, move on).

I'd be more likely to if they'd actually release an android app for amazon video, or the chromecast. The main devices I use with Netflix simply don't work with Amazon Video, so it's basically useless to me.

Shipping alone is worth <$80 for me. If they can make Amazon Video a more compelling offering, I'd be more likely to.

Yes, because I split the cost with my sister a couple of towns away so it'll still be $50-60 a year. I don't receive the video benefits since I'm not the primary subscriber but Netflix is enough for me.

Most likely. I use Amazon a fair amount and I'd rather not think about shipping costs when trying to buy stuff.

The video collection isn't extensive enough and needs to further grow to really compete with Netflix. But there's some stuff there that Netflix doesn't have so its good to have as a secondary source of entertainment possibilities.

There is one particular use of IRC channels that is insanely useful, that I'd like to share.

On various programming language channels, there are ad-hoc expression evaluation bots that experienced people use to guide newcomers through the intricacies of the language. If you're new to Haskell, for example, what you can do is grab the logs for the past 3 years, grep for "> " (used to invoke the evaluator) and you have instant insight into how an experienced Haskeller's mind works. It can speed up your learning by a factor of 10 compared to reading papers / blogs / formal tutorials. I know because it did this for me.

This is going to be borderline off-topic as it's not general for developers.

I have to mention #clojure on freenode for being an incredibly welcoming IRC channel. The discussions you will see can be very interesting, and the community is more than often willing to help. Living in Japan, I was worried about the timezones being an issue, but there seems to be people from different parts of the world on the channel, making it very nice.

I hang out on Freenode, in #nimrod, ##php, #elementary-dev and a couple of others.

I'd love to know some good security ones to idle in; I've got a bit of experience in it and am trying to expand it some more, and would love a place to ask questions regarding web security and the like.

#wikipedia-en is a channel where english wikipedia editors and admins hang out, and it is fun watching their discussions. #wikimedia-dev is where most of Mediawiki development happens these days, so that is nice too. #wikimedia-opearations is fun too once you ignore the icinga bot spam - not often do you get to see a world class ops team operate that transparently :

I don't know that there are too many interesting "abstract" IRC communities, beyond those Freenode channels specific to a given programming language or technology.

I leave a connection to Freenode running while I'm at work, in a few channels related to my job... so that during builds, or other short bursts of idle time, I can glace over and see if there are any questions I can answer. Likewise, I throw out a quick question of my own every now and then, when I'm afraid it's too subjective in nature to avoid being closed by StackOverflow-lawyers.

I've lost interest in general chat, outside of specific questions and answers. From what I've seen, the nicer communities are the newer channels. Ironically, they degrade over time as their underlying technology matures. You would think that channels like #clojure and #go-nuts would be populated by immature hipsters, while ##java would be made up of 40-something corporate types. However, I've found that those first two channels are welcoming and thoughtful, with interesting discussion always taking place... whereas ##java (even its mods) frequently sound like pre-teens yelling profanity at each other on XBox Live.

I've found #bash to be full of very helpful people. They don't get tired at all of being asked common bash questions. On most channels, if you ask a common question, they tell you to RTFM. But not on #bash. They still tell you to RTFM, but nicely, and usually after they give you an actual answer. Especially that greybot guy.

I've recently been using SaltStack and have found #saltstack on Freenode to be very welcoming and helpful which is nice. Often you go into a channel and it's a ghost town or out right hostile to relatively simple questions. I think OSS projects in general could learn a bit of "marketing" in this regard, if your IRC channels are toxic, I immediately think your community as a whole may be toxic.

An approach that seems to work well for me is to use IRC as a way to communicate with groups people that mostly I know in person and share a common interest with. That way, I'm able to avoid a social pecking order or having to be "initiated" into a group. You may already be in one of these groups already, though the medium isn't necessarily always IRC--think Skype (text) chats groups with a subset of regulars.

Remember, you can always drag others along with you and start your own channel.

#lp101 on ...I think?...EFNet was the hotbed of locksport/mechanical security discussion and research for quite a while. I was amazed by some of the results of IRC-based collaboration in that community.

Personally, I never found IRC to be a helpful tool for learning new things from unfamiliar people.

To me, IRC has always been a "grapevine" tool, where etiquette, social pecking orders and gossip are shared amongst a smallish close-knit social circle. IRC always feels more like a social scene, and a distraction.

If anything, perhaps an IRC channel is useful for managing fluid, rapidly changing situations, where you might need an up-to-date, live information source, to use in immediate decision making (hence, why bot net command and control tends to be integrated into IRC programs), but, otherwise, chat logs from IRC usually read like a disorganized array of participant's various scattered streams of consciousness.

You're welcome to join #nirc, it's a channel originally created for https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc but its since turned into a hangout for old coworkers and friends. We are all developers. Sometimes we are helping each other and other times we are talking about random shit... or in the event someone has a nirc question, we talk about that!

It's cool not only because it could revolutionize medical research and diagnostics. But also because it gives the world a fundamental new class of sensor on which new applications will be developed for years to come.

Right now, I'm working on Readborg [0], an Android app. It is a news reader for Philippine news. I know that there are lots of news reader out there, but I just checked the Play Store for News & Magazine category in the Philippines and it looks promising. The problem is, Flipboard, Feedly, and such caters majority of US and international news. For Readborg, I intend to cater Philippine news for Filipino readers.

Readborg is also tightly integrated with TextTeaser [1], an automatic summarization API that I created. Right now, it's on beta stage but you can already download it at Google Play Store [2] if Philippine news is relevant to you.

I am helping ex-addicts, like myself, to almost undo the accumulated damage and to rebuild themselves from within, by educating them in Eastern tradition of self-knowledge (our nature without religious nonsense).

I am also advocating "old-school" understanding-based approach to programming, as opposed to copy-paste-based modern coding.

It's an action-oriented shmup/MMO which feels a bit like EVE Online on steroids.

It is cool because all the game industry AAA developers have been pouring dozens of millions of dollars to copy World of Warcraft for more than 10 years, and they kind of forget to innovate in the MMO field. Making something different and seeing players appreciate it is hugely rewarding!

Also, making a MMO as a sole developer is extremely gratifying as a technical challenge. Doing everything from the website, payment, 3d graphics, networking engine, procedural game content, distributed servers, reporting, data analytics, server monitoring, but also marketing, making video trailers, talking to the press, going to game conventions... well... it's incredibly intense and overwhelming at times, but makes me feel very much... alive?

Been working on a book on asshole Javascript. A/B testing two titles: Javascript Technical Interview Questions[0] and Underhanded Javascript[1]

It's cool because the way it came to be was entirely accidental. I was working on much larger VM project when I told my friends "Javascript is so shit I can write a book about it". One of my friends egged me on, and I accidentally wrote 2 chapters the day HN went down. I'm now at 10 chapters and still writing.

Why is it cool? Currently 65 million Americans have high blood pressure, more than 380,000 die each year primarily due to high blood pressure, and it costs over 45 billion dollars in direct medical costs. Of even greater concern is that over 45% of those with hypertension do not have it under control. [1,2]

This app will provide instant and ubiquitous information about their blood pressure to everyday citizens without the need for (as many) visits to the doctor, or the purchasing of expensive medical equipment. It will empower the people to take greater control of their own health, and offers the potential to greatly reduce the burden on an already-overstretched healthcare system.

As it is based purely on the phone's video camera, it will be the first time people can use their mobile phone to measure their blood pressure in the convenience of their own home, at a time that suits them, without the need for connecting your phone to additional proprietary specialist hardware.

Smarter NPC. Not an actual game yet, but i started out trying to create a generic AI system for NPC, because i really want to play games like that. So i decided to contribute to this dream by making an open-source AI module for NPC to help game developers create amazing games.

My idea is to make a Goal-based system. Each NPC would have a set of goals, and would weigh in available actions as to how closer it would take them to their goals. I decided to start of with something simple like "maximize gold" so the NPC would take actions that resulted in most gold increase. i figured if i did it right, the NPC would themsleves figure out paths in action-trees that would let them make more gold. for example, figuring out that making wooden stuff out of logs is more profitable than selling raw wood. Or that if you can afford it, hiring people to make the wooden stuff (like a business/company) is more profitable overall than doing it yourself (cuz of multi-threading, opportunity cost, overall path weight, etc).

So it would be cool to see NPC picking out roles themselves, forming in-game societies and behavin in line with their goals. heck maybe someone can make a game that would involve using people's goals to influence them

Pathfinder d&d based character sheet manager. I got annoyed with the static and excel based offerings out there so I created my own. Currently I view it as near fully featured and want to make it work with more traffic than Heroku can support, but I have no idea how (web-hosting for these types of sites seems expensive as all heck).

Anywho, it was also a way for me to learn flask, bootstrap and knockout.

Was working on an automated cricket farm. Worked like a charm and didn't have to worry about water. But then got a mite infestation and had to release the little fellas. Will start again with a different design.

I've restarted working on http://myshigoto.com for finding English-speaking jobs in Japan) after doing pretty much nothing to it since creating it five years ago - scratching my own itch.

With the pick up in the Japanese economy recently I've noticed a few nice comments about it on blogs and forums. Not only is it satisfying to think I've helped people find a job, it's given me the incentive to improve it and maybe find a way to monetise it beyond just break-even AdSense revenue.

A media player in the browser, along with JARVIS like dashboard features like tracking space station flyover, keeping check on reddit, gmail, facebook etc notifications, moon phases, sun cycles, weather, sunrise sunset moon rise moon set notifications, torrent control and status notifications. All in one consolidated UI that is os and platform independent, runs in any standards compliant browser on any device/browser configurationon any device pc, hybrid touch phone tablet etc.

It runs offline, infact it keeps track of network connection changes and informs user if system goes online/offline. In chrome it also runs in background. I have implemented most of the above stuff other than facebook and remote control stuff. I plan to add bunch of other stuff, all I need is more time thanks to college. Anyone willing to invest? Lol.

It's re-imagining how you can interact with your codes history and GitHub pull requests. I'm desperately trying to get the installer and docs ready. The installer for Linux should be available this week and the installer for Mac OS X should be available next week.

I'm building http://citystrides.com ... It lets you track your running, city by city - the main purpose is to track the streets that you run in your city, but beyond that it also does shoe tracking, weather info, step counting (if you have a FitBit), and route sharing.

It started out with me wondering if I could run every street in my city (and not having a way to track that), but I'm growing it out to accommodate runners all over the world.

A huge byproduct of CityStrides is the collection of poly files for cities that I'm gathering at https://github.com/JamesChevalier/cities which can be used to generate OSM files out of larger regions.This data hasn't been available before now, so it might help create more city-focused projects.

Based on the Disciplined Entrepreneurship book and framework used by Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, DEToolbox is a set of checklists and tools to help you stay on track, and grow a healthy and successful startup.We already have a couple hundreds of users and the app is currently used at MIT as part of the Entrepreneurship Development Program.

Combining performance metrics + powerful exception reports and pure logging into single package makes optimization and debugging way easier than having X solutions in separate places. Works especially well for complex applications.

One of cool features is that we offer access to all data like SQL queries even in free plan - unlike New Relic and others.

It is cool because it aims to democratize algorithmic trading development using a geek approach.Algos are integrated with our marketplace http://isystems.com where clients all around the world use them on real accounts for a monthly fee.

I set myself a challenge: build one new HTML5 game per week in order to learn how to make games. So far I've made 6 games, and 1) I already learned a lot, and 2) the feedback I'm getting from players is super positive.

https://retred.org is a repository of (right now historical) events. There wasn't a good place where you can view and (soon will be able to add/edit) historical facts, not to mention cutting it up in various ways to see how things relate.

During occasional breaks, spinning your smartphone gives you a short but fulfilling positive sensation. After that you don't feel the urge to check all the usual distracting sources of procrastination (news, twitter, email...) and you are motivated to get back to what you were doing immediately.

http://lnav.org -- A fancy log file viewer for the terminal. Cool because it provides a lot of features over 'tail -f' without being more complicated to use. Just point lnav at your files at it will auto-detect the messages format and present you with a single time-ordered view of your log files.

It also has more advanced features (http://lnav.org/features/) that are usually only available in server-based solutions, like doing SQL queries over log messages.

I just launched a major update with lots of changes to the resume editor. Also improved the DOC conversion and templating code quite a bit.

It's cool because I think it is the most intuitive online resume maker out there that helps the job seekers in standing out from the other applicants through their resume but without actually going over the top with "super-creative" designs.

Because a simple tool to write & share beautifully is attracting a lot of people (+250k iOS users) and generating a different way of sharing text (+600k notes, now 12k daily). Also, technically speaking it's a nice example of technology marriage: the web and the native app enviroments. Android version soon, if you want to test drive, /android and suscribe.

I never got bored in the project. I've designed both iOS and the web applications and also helped to code LESS/HTML and SVG to create the base product and automated many things. It's fun as hell.

Free video chat using WebRTC for teachers/students doing online English lessons. You can click on a chat bubble and correct your partner's English. The app then automatically color codes and annotates the mistakes. The app will also track your mistakes (by type) over time.

https://github.com/Lazin/Akumuli - embedded time-series database. I'm trying to achieve very high write throughput - about 1M updates per second. The key idea here is to store data in large sorted files and search them with interpolation search with fall-back to binary search in some cases. I expect this method to be much more efficient than b-tree or LSM-tree for time-series data.

I hope it lets lots of people enjoy their music without having to download or pirate expensive software. I have recently open sourced it and looking for help on the project: https://github.com/adaline/mixbolt

http://www.zonino.co.uk is a platform for finding tech jobs in London startups. We scrape the jobs automatically parse them with a natural language processing system (GATE), index them and make them available to the public. For free! It gives me a nice fuzzy feeling :

We are working to make team management effortless and fun. Some of the features that make it possible: achievements, kanban board, online time counter, simple activity feed and dropbox integration. The result of this is called Hiburo [0].

http://www.passinglives.com an online obituary site, with a focus on long form photo obituaries so people are able to write a short story of someone's life rather than a few lines that you would find in a newspaper. A couple of sites in the States have a similar theme, but here in Europe still very much a new idea. We think it's cool because it's everything a newspaper obituary isn't - very affordable, global, interactive, perpetual, shareable. It's also ad free which makes it a respectable place to come to pay tribute to loved ones.

An iPhone app that motivates you to work harder.. Simply put you set goals and then.... I really can't give the idea away, I'm working hard day and night and it will be released in the next 8 weeks.

This app motivates you to achieve your goals. There are 3 twists on my idea however which make it different to other apps. I will definitely be using it myself so hopefully other will feel it helps them to achieve their goals also :)

I've only cried literal tears once in the last ten years, over business. Due to inattention while coding during an apartment move, I pushed a change to Appointment Reminder which was poorly considered. It didn't cause any immediate problems and passed my test suites, but the upshot is it was a time bomb that would inevitably bring down the site's queue worker processes and keep them down.

Lesson #1: Don't code when you're distracted.

Some hours later, the problem manifested. The queue workers came down, and AR (which is totally dependent on them for its core functionality) immediately stopped doing the thing customers pay me money to do. My monitoring system picked up on this and attempted to call me -- which would have worked great, except my cell phone was in a box that wasn't unpacked yet.

Lesson #2a: If you're running something mission critical, and your only way to recover from failure means you have to wake up when the phone rings, make sure that phone stays on and by you.

Later that evening I felt a feeling of vague unease about my change earlier and checked my email from my iPad. My inbox was full of furious customers who were observing, correctly, that I was 8 hours into an outage. Oh dear. I ssh'ed in from the iPad, reverted my last commit, and restarted the queue workers. Queues quickly went down to zero. Problem solved right?

Lesson #3: If at all possible, avoid having to resolve problems when exhausted/distracted. If you absolutely must do it, spend ten extra minutes to make sure you actually understand what went wrong, what your recovery plan is, and how that recovery plan will interact with what went wrong first.

AR didn't use idempotent queues (Lesson #4: Always use idempotent queues), so during the outage, every 5 minutes on a cron job every person who was supposed to be contacted that day got one reminder added to the queue. Fortuitously, AR didn't have all that many customers at the time, so only 15 or so people were affected. Less than fortuitously, those 15 folks had 10 to 100 messages queued, each. As soon as I pressed queues.restart() AR delivered all of those phone calls, text messages, and emails. At once.

Very few residential phone systems or cell phones respond in a customer-pleasing manner to 40 simultaneous telephone calls. It was a total DDOS on my customers' customers.

I got that news at 3 AM in the morning Japan time, at my new apartment, which didn't have Internet sufficient to run my laptop and development environment to see e.g. whose phones I had just blown up. Ogaki has neither Internet cafes nor taxis available at 3 AM in the morning. As a result, I had to put my laptop in a bag and walk across town, in the freezing rain, to get back to my old apartment, which still had a working Internet connection.

By the time I had completed the walk of shame I was drenched, miserable, and had magnified the likely impact that this had on customers' customers in my own mind. Then I got to my old apartment and checked email. The first one was, as you might expect, rather irate. And I just lost it. Broke down in tears. Cried for a good ten minutes. Called my father to explain what had happened, because I knew that I had to start making apology calls and wasn't sure prior to talking to him that I'd be able to do it without my voice breaking.

The end result? Lost two customers, regained one because he was impressed by my apology. The end users were mostly satisfied with my apologies. (It took me about two hours on the phone, as many of them had turned off their phones when they blew up.)

You'd need a magnifying glass to detect it ever happened, looking on any chart of interest to me. The software got modestly better after I spent a solid two weeks on improved fault tolerance and monitoring.

Lesson the last: It's just a job/business. The bad days are usually a lot less important in hindsight than they seem in the moment.

Not the worst at all, but probably one I found most amusing. One of my jobs included some sys admin tasks (this wasn't the position, but we all did dev ops), among my other responsibilities. I spent half a day going through everything with the person responsible for most of the admin tasks at the time. She was an extremely dilligent and competent admin, did absolutely everything through configuration management and kept very thorough personal logs and documentation on the entire network. One of my first tasks was to change backup frequency (or other singular change) and going by how I usually did things at the time, just sudid a vi session, changed the frequency and restarted the service.

She found out about it pretty quickly due to having syslog be a constant presence in one of her gnu screen windows and gave me a look. She quickly reverted what I did, updated our config management tool, tested it, then deployed it, while explaining why this was the right way to do things. I slowly came around to doing things the right way and haven't thought much about the initial incident until we found her personal logs that she archived and left on our public network share for future reference.

In the entries for the day that I started, we saw the following two lines:

One summer in college, I got an internship at a company that made health information systems. After fixing bugs in PHP scripts for a couple weeks, I was granted access to their production DB. (Hey, they were short on talent.) This database stored all kinds of stuff, including the operating room schedules for various hospitals. It included who was being operated on, when, what operation they were scheduled for, and important information such as patient allergies, malignant hyperthermia, etc.

I was a little sleepy one morning and accidentally connected to prod instead of testing. I thought, "That's weird, this UPDATE shouldn't have taken so long-oh shit." I'd managed to clear all allergy and malignant hyperthermia fields. For all I knew, some anesthesiologist would kill a patient because of my mistake. I was shaking. I immediately found the technical lead, pulled him from a meeting, and told him what happened. He'd been smart enough to set up hourly DB snapshots and query logs. It only took five minutes to restore from a snapshot and replay all the logs, not including my UPDATE.

Afterwards, my access to prod was not revoked. We both agreed I'd learned a valuable lesson, and that I was unlikely to repeat that mistake. The tech lead explained the incident to the higher-ups, who decided to avoid mentioning anything to the affected hospitals.

A local Subway franchise was the very first company that hired me. I was extremely young, shy, and intensely socially awkward, yet excited to join the workforce (as I had my eyes set on a Pentium processor).

When I worked at Subway, the bread dough came frozen, but you would put loaves in a proofer, proof it for a certain amount of time, and then bake it. My first shift, however, got busy and I left several trays in the proofer for a very, very long time. Consequently, they rose to roughly the size of loaves of bread, as opposed to the usual buns.

It was my very first shift alone at any job in my life, so I did the most logical thing I could think of and put the massive buns in the oven. They cooked up nicely enough and I thought I was saved. Until I tried to cut into one.

Back in that day, Subway used to cut those silly u-shaped gouges out of their buns. In retrospect, I think this was most likely a bizarre HR technique designed to weed out the real dummies, but at the time I was oblivious (likely because I was one of the dummies they should have weeded out). When I ran out of the normal bread, I grabbed one of my monstrosities, tried to cut into it, and discovered that it was not only rock hard, but the loaf broke apart as I tried to cut it.

That night, my severe shyness and social awkwardness had their first run-in with beasts known as angry customers. I was scared I would get fired, so I promptly made new buns, but spent the rest of my shift trying to get rid of my blunder. I discovered some really interesting things about people that night. First, you'd be surprised how incredibly nice customers are if you are straight up with them. Some customers I never met before met the big, crumbly buns as an adventure and, in doing so, helped me sell all the ruined buns.

In the end, I came clean (and didn't get fired). That horrible night was a huge event in the dismantling of my shell. It taught me an awful lot about ethics. And frankly, that brief experience in food service forever changed how I deal with staff in similar types of jobs.

I was testing disaster recovery for the database cluster I was managing. Spun up new instances on AWS, pulled down production data, created various disasters, tested recovery.

Surprisingly it all seemed to work well. These disaster recovery steps weren't heavily tested before. Brilliant! I went to shut down the AWS instances. Kill DB group. Wait. Wait... The DB group? Wasn't it DB-test group...

I'd just killed all the production databases. And the streaming replicas. And... everything... All at the busiest time of day for our site.

Panic arose in my chest. Eyes glazed over. It's one thing to test disaster recovery when it doesn't matter, but when it suddenly does matter... I turned to the disaster recovery code I'd just been testing. I was reasonably sure it all worked... Reasonably...

Less than five minutes later, I'd spun up a brand new database cluster. The only loss was a minute or two of user transactions, which for our site wasn't too problematic.

My friends joked later that at least we now knew for sure that disaster recovery worked in production...

I run Correlated.org, which is the basis for the upcoming book "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" (July 2014, Perigee).

I had had some test tables sitting around in the database for a while and decided to clean them up. I stupidly forgot to check the status of my backups; because of an earlier error, they were not being correctly saved.

So, I had a bunch of tables with similar names:

users_1024 users_1025 users_1026

I decided to delete them all in one big swoop.

Guess what got deleted along with them? The actual users table (which I've since renamed to something that does not even contain "users" in it).

So, how do you recover a users table when you've just deleted it and your backup has failed?

Well, I happened to have all of my users' email addresses stored in a separate mailing list table, but that table did not store their associated user IDs.

So I sent them all an email, prompting them to visit a password reset page.

When they visited the page, if their user ID was stored in a cookie -- and for most of them, it was -- I was able to re-associate their user ID with their email address, prompt them to select a new password, and essentially restore their account activity.

There was a small subset of users who did not have their user IDs stored in a cookie, though.

Here's how I tackled that problem:

Because the bulk of a user's activity on the site involves answering poll questions, I prompted them to select some poll questions that they had answered previously, and that they were certain they could answer again in the same way. I was then able to compare their answers to the list of previous responses and narrow down the possibilities. Once I had narrowed it down to a single user, I prompted them to answer a few more "challenge" questions from that user's history, to make sure that the match was correct. (Of course, that type of strategy would not work for a website where you have to be 100% sure, rather than, say, 98% sure, that you've matched the correct person to the account.)

In late 2008 when I was in the Marines and deployed to Iraq I was following too closely behind the vehicle in front while crossing a wadi and we hit an IED (the first of 3 that day).

Nobody was killed, but we had a few injured. Thankfully the brunt of it hit the MRAP in front of us. If it hit my vehicle (HMMWV, flat bottom) instead I probably wouldn't be here.

That was the first major operation on my first deployment, too. Hello, world!

My takeaway? Shit just got real.

We ended up stranded that night after the 3rd IED strike (our "rescuers" said it was too dangerous to get us). It was the scariest day of my life, but in similar future situations it was different. I still felt fear and the reality of the existential threat, but I accepted it. It was almost liberating. Strange.

I deployed for another year after that (to Afghanistan that time). After Afghanistan I left the Corps and started my company. Because if it fails, what's the worst that can happen? Lulz.

Long ago when I was, I think, a sophomore in college and worked for the university IT group, I was trying to add an external drive to an early NeXT machine [1]. I wanted to try out their fancy GUI development stuff, you see. I was at best a modestly competent Unix admin, and this was circa NextStep 1.0, so the OS was... rough. It was in the dark days of SCSI terminators, so just telling if the drive was properly connected and, if so, how to address it was challenging.

After a couple hours of swearing, instead of working from a root shell in my own account, I just logged into the GUI as root. And there was a pretty interface showing the disks. I could just click on one and format it. Hooray!

Well either the GUI was buggy or I clicked on the wrong disk, because as the format was going, I realized the external drive wasn't doing anything. I was formatting the internal boot hard drive. And since nobody but me gave a crap about this weird free box somebody had given them, they had repurposed it. As a file server. For the home directories of a bunch of my colleagues. Who were now collecting around me wondering what was going on. Oops.

No problem, says I. I'll just restore from backups. But this thing used a weird magneto-optical drive [2]. The only boot media we had was on an MO disk. The backups were on another. And there was only one of these drives, probably only one in the whole state. The drives were, of course, incredibly slow, especially if you needed to swap disks. Which, I eventually discovered, I would have to do about a million times to have a hope of recovery.

Long story short, I spent 28 hours in a row in that chair. It was my immersion baptism [2] in the ways of being a sysadmin. The things I learned:

Fear the root shell. It should be treated with as much caution as a live snake.

Have backups. People will do dumb things; be ready.

A backup plan where you have never tried restoring anything may lead to more excitement than you want.

Be suspicious of GUI admin tools. Avoid new GUI admin tools if at all possible. Let somebody else be the one to discover the dangerous flaws.

When some young idiot fucks up, check to make sure that they are sufficiently freaked out. If they are, no need to yell at them. Instead support them in solving the problem.

Seriously, my colleagues were awesome about this. I went on to become an actual paid sysadmin, and spent many years enjoying the work. The experience taught me fear, and a level of care that sticks with me today. I'm sure at the time I was wishing somebody would wave a magic wand and make it the problems go away, but working through it gave me a level of comfort in apparent disasters that has been helpful many times since.

~ 2007, working in a large bioinformatics group with our own very powerful cluster, mainly used for protein folding. Example job: fold every protein from a predicted coding region in a given genome. I was mostly doing graph analysis on metabolic and genetic networks though, and writing everything in Perl.

I had a research deadline coming up in a month, but I was also about to go on a hunting trip and be incommunicado for two weeks. I had to kick off a large job (about 75,000 total tasks) but I figured spread over our 8,000 node cluster it would be okay (GPFS storage, set up for us by IBM). I kicked off the jobs as I walked out the door for the woods.

Except I had been doing all my testing of those jobs locally, and my Perl environment was configured slightly differently on the cluster, so while I was running through billions of iterations on each node I was writing the same warning to STDOUT, over and over. It filled up the disks everywhere and caused an epic I/O traffic jam that crashed every single long-running protein folding job. The disk space issues caused some interesting edge cases and it was basically a few days before the cluster would function properly and not lose data or crash jobs. The best part was that I was totally unreachable and thus no one could vent their ire, causing me to return happy and well-rested to an overworked office brimming with fermented ill-will. And I didn't get my own calculations done either, causing me to miss a deadline.

Lessons learned:

1) PRODUCTION != DEVELOPMENT ever ever ever ever2) Big jobs should be proceeded by small but qualitatively identical test jobs 3) Don't launch any multi-day builds on a Friday4) Know what your resource consumption will mean for your colleagues in the best and worst cases5) Make sure any bad code you've written has been aired out before you go on vacation6) Don't use Perl when what you really needed was Hadoop

I was once in charge of running an A/B test at my work. Part of the test involved driving people to a new site using AdWords.

After the test was complete, I forgot to turn off the Adwords. (Such a silly mistake...) Nobody notices until our bill arrives from Google, and it's substantially higher than normal. When my coworker came to ask me about it, "are these your campaigns?!?" I just sank in my chair.

I think it cost the company $30k. I suppose it's not that much money in the grand scheme of things, but I felt very bad.

Not the worst, but certainly most infamous thing I've done: I was testing a condition in a frontend template which, if met, left a <!-- leo loves you --> comment in the header HTML of all the sites we served. Unfortunately the condition was always met and I pushed the change without thinking. This was back in the day when bandwidth was precious and extraneous HTML was seriously frowned upon. We didn't realize it was in production for a week, at which point several engineers actually decided to leave it in as a joke. Then someone higher up found out and browbeat me into removing it, citing bandwidth and disk space costs.

Now, if you go to a CNET site and view source, there's a <!-- Chewie loves you --> comment. I like to think of that as an homage to my original fuckup.

It will take a while for this to trickle to the VC market. Consider a situation where most of them have already raised funds. They may become more picky because of reanalyzing long-term effects (shittier IPOs), but they will still have money to invest.

If you are worried, perhaps you should consider the alternate: bootstrapped model.

It seems that even though bootstrapped companies grow much slower, these companies are a lot more healthy and aren't regulated as much by financial markets (no boom or bust models).

Not sure what the other commenters mean with "HN is not the place for this". He is asking about an idea, he is not testing anything.

As for the app, and also as someone who loves tracking himself, I would like it. In fact, I did this manually in my google calendar at one point but only for a month or so because there was too much friction.

I am also interested in how it would detect being with someone. Seems strange. Another solution, which I am using in a personal tracking project, could be to simply send a local notification at the end of each day - asking "Who were you with today?". I've noticed that this works pretty well. I send one to myself once after 24 hours, and then twice (+24more) if the first one was not "answered".

There are already plenty of apps which do similar things, like foursquare, but they tend to focus on locations rather than people (x went to this restaurant, etc.)

As you describe it, I don't see why I as a user would want other users to know who i've been hanging out with. If you can find a way to do it that doesn't seem quite so neo-Orwellian then there might be some value to it, otherwise other apps are already doing it better and I think you'll have quite a lot of network effect to overcome.

I switched from teaching to development (front end) in the last year. My background is in literature and I taught poetry at universities in America (adjunct) and I taught general lit. at an international school in Japan for a few years. Even though I loved teaching, I quit for a few reasons.

- I gave serious thought to what kinds of projects I'd like to be working on in 5 years, and discovered that I wanted to contribute to society on a larger scaleI wanted to affect more lives.

- Teaching didn't allow for constant iteration. I couldn't test out new ideas as quickly as I would like. If I blew a lesson, I'd have to wait another year to try and make it better.

- The institutions felt slow to adapt and change, and there was constantly push back when I tried to do something different.

- I completely understand the feeling of burning outit's very real for teachers (and students)but the worst feeling that comes with teaching is how sad it is every year to say goodbye to your students after spending so much time investing in their well being.

I really enjoy front end development and user interaction, and on top of that I find programming creatively satisfying, but it was hard to figure out how to get my foot in the door, so here's the approach I took.

Stay focusedonce you start getting down the rabbit hole, try not to get distracted by all of the cool stuff you find. I was constantly tempted by other languages and platforms (iOS development always looks so great), but I really wanted to be a front end dev (I was getting back into it after years away), so I had to put on blinders and really focus on the core front end stack.

Learn your toolsfinding out the baseline of knowledge for the field you want to enter is paramount, but so is learning how to use the tools. I think having grunt in my toolbox has been paramount in allowing me to level up quicklylearning best practices by osmosis.

Don't let being a teacher work against youAfter years of trying to teach students to appreciate weirdo obscure lit, I learned to pay attention and ask better questions. I learned that my first instincts about how to do things was usually wrong, and I had to be willing to kill my darlings. For me, this skill manifests itself when architecting UI or thinking about user experience. Using software for the user is like learning something new. How can you set the user up to succeed. This is taken from my cover letter:

"What a teacher or a developer/designer should do is help a user recognize patterns and give them enough information to fill in any gaps and reaffirm what they already know. However, it's difficult to know where you should begin, when you should take a step back and simplify an abstract concept. That's why a teacher or a developer's main task is to observe, ask questions, and take feedbackto swallow one's ego and remain flexible."

If you've been teaching for more than a week, you know how to swallow your ego and take feedback. On top of that, you're likely very patient. These are strengths you developed via teaching.

A further strength you've developed is the ability to _teach_. Developing is ripe with teaching opportunities. You likely write great documentation, great code comments, and do so in a way that is very complete without making someone feel as though you're talking down to them.

You're also pretty good a planning a project. I always felt that 80% of good teaching was due to adequate preparation. I've been honing this skill and taking advantage of my tooling to help me architect my projects. For example, assume you're working on a project which will be used in multiple instances. The core will remain the same but the outward manifestation will change from instance to instance. Good planning beforehand will likely aid you in maintaining that project in the future (so you don't have forks on top of forks).

And I'll return to patience. Teaching is probably the hardest job in the world, and you've learned to be patient. This is a huge asset. Play it up.

You're not going to try to convince these companies that you're a good fit despite your experience teaching but because of it. Apply for positions where they will see a real benefits from your teaching experience. Perhaps something where your work will interface with users. You probably won't enjoy a job where your work exists behind the scenes and is largely esoteric. You've got that education itch to scratch, and it probably won't ever go away.

You need someone to take a chance on you; make the conversation about your strengths (of which there are likely many).

(One caveat: I quit my teaching job before I had a programming job and spent a few months trying to bring my skills up to an appropriate before applying to positions. This was a very scary time, but in the end it paid off. It was a big leap, and it worked out, but nerve wracking nonetheless)

I also used to me a middle school teacher, now turned full stack developer.

For me the best skills teaching taught me were being patient, prepared, and calm in almost any situation. As a teacher you know how to tackle political situations very similar to what you'll see in an office.

Within two years as a developer, I was running a program at my work in which I'd hire and train new grads by pair programming with them. I'd still have to get done a full weeks work, but I'd get to pair exclusively with a "mentee" for a couple months till they were up to speed. It was awesome to get to use my skills that way.

The hardest thing I still struggle with is not smothering my coworkers when they are stuck. Most developers got where they are by being good at struggling through challenges, and therefore more do not enjoy their hands being held through a "teaching moment". I've had to learn to take a very subtle touch through most of those.

How I actually transitioned is sadly just luck. I duel studied CS and education in college, and a friend of mine offered me a development job when he saw how miserable I was. I wish there was a simple trick I could offer, but no.

What I would suggest though is to go to meetups in your area. Find a technology to learn, and go to meetups about that. While you are learning it, pick a topic not recently covered by a group, and present on it. You'll be great at that, and it will demonstrate both your technical knowledge and your social/team skills.

If you're ever in the Philadelphia area, let me know, and I'll buy you a coffee and talk your ear off.

This is a very common issue, and you shouldn't feel bad about deciding it's not for you. It's also common to have guilt or self-identity issues for a while after leaving.

Math is kind of a broad area. Some people coming from it will have a very easy time adapting to software or finance, others will have to start more or less from scratch. There's also the question of whether you'll like it. Good signs are if you're more towards the applied / problem solving side, and if you have fond memories of playing in Mathematica.

Since the problem is fit and lifestyle more than other issues, you might consider going for internships first. This would give you a way to get your feet wet and test for fit before over-investing too much in one path, and it could also give you an easier way to transition into the industry.

And yeah, LOTS of people do get into those fields from math, random sciences, engineering..."your major is not your career."

Note on internships:

At least in the US, internships do have to be paid if you're producing actual work product - despite what a lot of companies will try to pull. "Companies who are unaware of basic employment law or who think it's fun to flout labor laws" is a good filter for companies that aren't worth your time.

If you're having trouble justifying time spent on developing software, why not develop software which helps you manage your teaching job? Most software is pretty generic, so experience on any old project should involve a wide enough array of knowledge to give you a start.

Teaching is a thankless job, and that fact is particularly soul crushing to those who want to do a good job and work hard. Thanks for trying to improve maths education with your hard earned degree.

Maybe it's possible (albeit challenging) to change your role to one with the aspects you like (teaching) without those you dislike (ridiculous hours and meddling)?

In a slightly older but similar version of your situation, I quit my 15 years of secondary and third level teaching (also in the UK) to join a software multinational and promote computer science (with kids & adults). The job is different but in my (so far limited) experience, far more rewarding than almost all aspects of traditional teaching (no silly paperwork, better financial rewards).

I think what helped me get the job was not my extensive teaching experience or research publications (I doubt they even took them into consideration) but my passion for the subject, track record at inspiring kids and the educational open source software I had developed.

Best advice I can think of, if you are dedicated to building a portfolio, build software that you use in class. That way you can mentally justify the time (I need this to teach) and also test its efficacy. Good luck.